Weekend Reads:

  1. In the Hindustan Times, Singdha Poonam and Leena Dhankar tell the story of how a teenager who shot a classmate in school in 2007 is now a leading don in Haryana’s underworld.
  2. In the first of a five-part series, Bhanupriya Rao writes in IndiaSpend about the triumph of Tamil Nadu’s women leaders like Sharmila Devi, the youngest Dalit sarpanch of a panchayat in the south of the state who brought drinking water to her village.
  3. Neha Bhatt in Mint writes about all the Bihari food that is ignored or unknown, beyond ‘litti chokha.’
  4. Smita Gupta in Blink recounts the story of how the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh grew roots in India’s North East.
  5. “The East India Company remains history’s most terrifying warning about the potential for the abuse of corporate power – and the insidious means by which the interests of shareholders become those of the state,” writes William Dalrymple in the Guardian.
  6. “If one removes the thin disguise of digital bombast and acronym-led rhetoric, the Narendra Modi government’s operations of power at the Centre were, in fact, something the CPI(M) had taken pride in practicing in the states it ruled,” says Sayandeb Chowdhury in The Wire.
  7. “YouTube leads viewers down a rabbit hole of extremism, while Google racks up the ad sales,” writes Zeynep Tufekci in the New York Times.
  8. Maulik Pathak in Mint talks to BV Doshi, the Indian architect who has just won the 2018 Pritzker Award about his inspiration and connection to nature.
  9. Jane Mayer in the New Yorker profiles Christopher Steele, the man behind the infamous Donald Trump dossier.
  10. Fake news is as powerful and intractable a problem as you might imagine, especially because it doesn’t depend on malicious actors but on human tendency, finds the largest-ever study of the problem, explains Robinson Meyer in the Atlantic.

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